According to the news agency, Apple is in talks with US health providers at Mount Sinai, the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins. It's also apparently in talks with existing digital healthcare company Epic Systems, too. The plan, it seems, is for Apple to become a "hub of health data" which doesn't just pool data for your personal consumption, but makes it available to physicians as and when they need it.

As Reuters points out, data such as blood pressure, pulse and weight is recorded by hundreds and thousands of different third-party healthcare software applications. The problem, though, is that it's not stored centrally, anywhere. Now, Apple plans to bring it all together, and "hopes physicians will use this data to better monitor patients between visits – with the patient's consent — so the doctors can make better diagnostic and treatment decisions."

In many ways, it's a wonderful idea: a wealth of data, available to physicians to use as and when they need, from wherever they are. There is, however, a whole tangle of privacy concerns and regulations to consider—and that's something that Apple is clearly trying to negotiate during these talks.

Clearly this news is geared towards the US healthcare system. But if something similar were to be integrated into the NHS, or even private healthcare in the UK, would you use the service? [Reuters]